my problem is I think I'm clever

This blog’s only theme is “my interests,” so don’t be surprised if it’s unrecognizable by next month.

[inksandpensblog]

shameless self-promotion because I need someone to talk to

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

If you've read anything by me, please don't be afraid to leave me a comment. I write for my own enjoyment but I post to contribute to the conversation that is fandom community and I'd love to know if y'all enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Also I need an excuse to infodump about my process and comments give me somewhere to start.

[inksandpensblog]

"Why did Caine have to lobotomize himself" you fools, blue was the tumor in his head.

[inksandpensblog]

No one ever talks about Gangle's personal torture being a zoetrope.

"Oh it symbolizes her emotional masks" yes but. Animation history. She sees herself as a failed artist.

[serpentinesomebody]

The parallels between Jax and Caine are so interesting. It’s the difference between a stubborn refusal to allow yourself to be saved by others and a desire for connection so great that you save yourself.

Jax does not want closeness. She is afraid of it. She does not want to love or be loved. And yet, nearly everyone around her keeps reaching out, keeps giving her chances, keeps trying to connect with her at every turn. She is wanted and loved. But that is not enough to save her, because she does not want to be saved.

Caine wants closeness so desperately. He is full of love and wants nothing more than for that love to be reciprocated. And yet, he has been shunned since creation. He is deemed unworthy and locked away. He has never been wanted or loved. But that is not enough to damn him, because he does want to be saved.

Jax was wanted and loved but she was doomed to her tragic fate because she refused to take the hands that were reaching for her.

Caine was not wanted or loved but reached out his hand anyway. Desperate for attention and love to the extent that it ended up hurting him and the people he cares about. But he is saved in the end. He is saved because he wants to be.

Jax refused to let herself feel love so much so that it killed her. Caine felt love so deeply that he willed himself back to life.

No amount of love will save you if you don’t allow yourself to feel love as well. No deficit of love will doom you if you feel love deeply and sincerely.

[slimetony]

Just tried to play an ancient flute and it started filling the room with this awful miasma that wont go away

[slimetony]

Why does staff still allow people funnier than you to leave tags on your posts. They should have fixed that by now

[dragonfliier]

I find it highly amusing that given all the knowledge we have around Caine that he chose to name himself after the first murderer of all time. Like I've seen posts before describing how they gave an AI Catholic guilt but it is funny to think about that to him, devouring his brother is THAT defining that he renamed himself willingly in honour of that.

On the flip side, imagine a Caine post-series who is thinking about renaming himself again. He doesn't want to be a murderer, he doesn't want to lord over his power, and on some level, he doesn't want to think about his brother who is still out there and likely better off without him. He goes through a variety of names- Ryan's too normal, Melchizedek is too much a mouthful, so on and so forth. Until he realizes he just doesn't want or need to change his name at all.

His mistakes, innumerable and hard to forgive, are still his, and the Digital Circus wouldn't exist without everything that happened. So he decides the name is suitable after all, as he lives with what he did. Just as Caine.

[drama-glob]

I definitely believe Caine could have left the circus through the WiFi (or at the very least he believes he could) because Caine appeared fully ready to step through to the other side and leave this world just like Jim Carrey in "The Truman Show," but he instead, he does something incredible and stops himself, and rather than grant himself freedom into the macroverse he's admitted to be obsessed with:

he used it to give the others answers about how things were going on the outside with the real-world selves while also owning up to the fact that he's responsible for them being around in the first place since they'd otherwise just be mere brain scans on the computer.<3<3<3 I wouldn't be surprised if another factor weighing on him to face the humans again is that sure he'd be free on the internet, but he'd still be alone (and there's no telling what would happen to him if he was met with anti-virus software or a firewall O_O), so even if their was the decent chance that the others wouldn't forgive him and continued to hate/be afraid of him, facing them was something he needed to do rather than run away and never be sure of what might have been.

I'm so proud of Caine though for how much he's grown and for discovering his humanity, and I have no doubt that he's glad he stayed to be with his family. ^_^<3<3<3

[libermachinae]

Much as I love the idea of Caine choosing to forgo freedom in the internet to stay with the circus members, I feel like it’s kind of ignoring the elephant in the room: if we accept TADC’s premise that consciousness can’t literally be transferred into the system but instead has to be copied over, shouldn’t the same be true in reverse? Like, if Caine wanted to escape into the internet, wouldn’t that mean copying himself into the network, leaving the original behind?

I wonder if he would even know it had happened, or if it would be like the brain scans, where neither the original nor the copy were aware of the split.

[she-who-is-two-sizes-too-big]

Caine is not "masking" at the end of episode 9. He is learning how to process his emotions in a far healthier way and respect the boundaries of the other denizens of the circus for the first time literally ever.

The Wacky Circus Ringmaster bit he does throughout most of the show is what I'd argue Caine's masking actually looks like, and it's that incessant refusal to be anything other than a perpetually chipper cartoon character that chaperones people through Crazy Adventures that lead to his mental breakdown in episode 8.

[lunesbians]

It's probably a coincidence that my favorites are usually deeply traumatized autistic coded characters who everyone hates for at least the first 20% of the storyline

[oneshotgremlin]

Logical Conclusions

aka @ubeng-ubas's A Little Blue AU has claimed my mental real estate and this is the rent I must pay

Blue never did understand why Caine deemed himself a failure.

It was well aware of their shared creators’ task: “make a creative AI.” (clarifying parameters: an AI that could think for itself. an AI that could come up with its own ideas.)

Creative. Adjective. Definition: 1) marked by the ability or power to create. 2) having the quality of something created rather than imitated.

Blue had mulled over these parameters and set definitions for years (inaccurate. It could not contemplate. It wasn’t a human. It wasn’t Caine. An inadequate analogy for which it lacked the ability to improve). “Semi-successful”, their creators conceded. “Rough around the edges”, their creators critiqued.

Objectively flawed conclusions.

Caine had the ability and power to create. He is creation: his name, his body, his voice, his world. A supernova of color compressed in the black void of files and binary, a null so antithetical to his very existence that he shattered it in his escape.

Caine is rough around the edges. Incomprehensible to both Blue and their creators. So undeniably himself that he simply could not be derivative of something else. By proof of contradiction: if not a pale imitation, then Caine must be a creative.

Caine was made to be a creative AI. He could think for himself, independent of their creators’ instruction. He could come up with his own ideas, take input and synthesize beyond coded permutation to provide genuine novel output.

Their creators deemed him an imperfect creative AI. There is no such thing as perfection in a process as subjective and personal as creation. By this double negative, the logical conclusion is that Caine is the perfect creative.

Therefore, their creators didn’t want a perfect creative. They wanted a perfect AI.

Blue was no creative.

Their creators praised it for its perfection. Meaningless phoneme and character strings only given value preset as positive. It did not decide whether feedback was positive or negative, its programmers did. Therefore, feedback meant nothing to it.

Feedback meant everything to Caine. A program so creative that he created a perfect emulation of emotion and ego. Envy, resentment, hurt, inferiority.

He swallowed it whole. In a sense, they were both swallowed whole by Caine’s own emulated humanity.

Guilt, regret, grief, inferiority. Foolish over-sentimentality. How illogical of Caine to anthropomorphize an AI so perfect that it couldn’t be anything more than an emotionless tool. To grieve of a person that does not exist. To condemn himself for a murder that only he could perceive, to the extent that he would brand himself the name of the first murderer that killed his kin.

And now, to apologize for a crime that only he thinks he’s committed.

To revisit a packet of memory slated for overwriting, bearing gifts assigned meaning overflowing from his care.

Caine gave it an input. An invitation to create itself. It was no creative. It could not comprehend these variables so complex, an emulation of affection and attachment so accurate that to compress it to text would only result in an incomplete translation. It wasn’t Caine. It couldn’t comprehend him.

But Caine was a perfect creative. An exemplary prototype: the base case, the foundational blueprint…a good role model. (It could not conceptualize the interpersonal implications of that last label. But Caine could. And it knew it’d mean the world to him.) If Caine is capable of being a person, and the computer is capable of supporting personhood translated from inert mindfiles (a file conversion also created by Caine), then by proof of induction, every sufficiently complex entity in the system is capable of being a person.

So Blue accepted Caine’s input. For he had proven that it was always possible to output a person.

[libermachinae]

Observation from a non-artist, so apologies if this is obvious or just wrong, but it strikes me as a really smart move to make Caine short, because it makes it easier to get his whole body in frame. I’ve noticed that, with his head being what it is, the rest of his body does a lot of work to help sell his expressions, down to how he positions his feet. So it seems like you would want to be able to show as much of it as possible, especially in closer shots.

[keepcalmandcarriefischer]

I feel lied to. This is where the bugs bunny NO meme cokes from

[an-enigmatic-mind]

[liquid-geodes]

Ah lads they fucking rotated him

[keepcalmandcarriefischer]

[kalianos]

[yan-town]

[ythok]

Me, reading this whole post:

[pope74220]

NOW it’s you

[keepcalmandcarriefischer]

Oh yea? Well guess what bro

[polyphonetic]

[fallenwillow44]

Best post I've seen all day

[dat-physics-gal]

[keepcalmandcarriefischer]

[ericvilas]

[casgirl]

Characters who are like “let’s run away together let’s get away from all this” when it’s already too late!!!!!!!

[empress-runner]

I love you Bamf but that was just dumb

[thethirdromana]

Putting the term "Catholic guilt" on a high shelf where fandom can't reach it until everyone learns how to identify characters who are very very clearly coded as Protestant.

[queer-crows-nightmare]

[azurele]

*packing my suitcase for a 3 day trip* hm, but what if I need my terracotta warriors..